Daniel Munduruku is far from naive. Whether he is traveling the world to talk about literature and promote the more than 60 books he has written or acting in a soap opera on Globo TV, Brazil’s highest-rated TV broadcaster, he is aware that access to places until recently inaccessible to indigenous people can be used against the centuries-old struggle of his kind.
“The fact that we’ve found ourselves a spot in literature, academia, politics, and a number of other places can mislead us into thinking we’re doing a great thing when in fact we’re only helping feed the economic system that we reject,” he stated.
Invited to imagine the future of indigenous peoples for a new series of interviews* with intellectuals, indigenous leaders, and activists to be published by Agência Brasil for Indigenous Peoples’ Day on Friday (April 19), Munduruku criticized non-indigenous society’s fixation with the future.
“Looking to the future alienates people from the more immediate need to build our existence in the present. It’s a vision that educates people to selfishness,” he argued, adding that indigenous people traditionally conceive of time differently, focusing on the past and the present, where they seek answers to further withstand the destruction of their territories and their way of being.
“Time is circular, like nature. It feeds itself as it unfolds and projects itself forward. History repeats itself. It’s reproducing itself right now in a harsh, cruel way—and not just for indigenous peoples,” he went on to say.
Born in Belém, in the northern state of Pará, in 1964, Munduruku holds a degree in Philosophy and a PhD in Education from the University of São Paulo (USP), and is hailed as one of the greatest champions of indigenous culture. Most of his extensive work is aimed at children and teenagers.
In 2017, he won a Jabuti, Brazil’s most traditional literary award, in the Young People’s category for his book Vozes Ancestrais (“Ancestral Voices”). In 2004, he had received an honorable mention in the same award for the children’s version of his Coisas de Índio (“Indian Things”). “My writing is a form of weeping, aimed at sensitizing adults,” he declared.
Below are excerpts from the interview Daniel Munduruku gave a day after returning from his trip to Italy.
In your lectures, interviews, and books, you highlight the fact that the Munduruku and other indigenous ethnic groups conceive of time in a different way. They think about the future very differently from non-indigenous Western thought. Could you please elaborate on this?
Munduruku: I think I can speak in rather general terms without fear of being unfair. They don’t see time as linear, but rather as something that feeds itself, unfolding and projecting itself forward. The past concerns who we are, where we came from, and the present is where we experience the outcome of all this. As a result, these peoples have built a worldview that’s not based on the time of the clock, on production, or the accumulation of material wealth. That’s the vision stemming from a linear conception of time, which has to do with the certainty that there’s something beyond the present, the future. From this linear perspective, people will be happier in the future. This is how the great Western stories about a quest for anything big are born: from the holy grail to a life after this life. This vision of the future alienates people from the more immediate need to build our own existence in the present. It’s a vision that educates people to selfishness, to dispute, to conquer and colonize others. All Western pedagogy is based on the famous question “what will you be when you grow up?” In traditional indigenous communities, children are not asked what they’re going to be when they grow up. They understand they’re already what they can only be now. It’s up to the community and the adults to provide the conditions for them to be a child to the full, to grow up and become a balanced young person, and later on an old person who’s aware of their role in the world. This means linking their present being to the future, establishing a circular relationship, and educating for the collective.
Nonetheless, the indigenous people themselves are demanding that we think about the future, calling for public policies that require targets as well as the evaluation of results. Shouldn’t we think about the future as a way of responding to present problems?
Munduruku: What the indigenous people want is to live a long life. For that, we need the right conditions. And one condition is not to live in constant dispute with each other. When we fight, we destroy, dominate, enslave, and kill. And not everyone can be happy this way, hence the criticism of this approach to the future, which results, as I said, in a view that alienates and educates to selfishness. In order to solve the present problems of the indigenous peoples, problems that unfold from the past, they would have to demarcate all the territories and give the indigenous people autonomy to decide what to do with these lands. It would be up to the indigenous people to decide the best way forward. I repeat, it’s not just about ways of life. It’s about how the economy governs the world. Even though the concept of circular economy exists, the economy that effectively governs the world is linear. It would be necessary and urgent to give indigenous people the opportunity to decide how to bring the indigenous circular economy and the linear economy together.
Having said these things, what do you think the future holds for indigenous peoples? Do you agree that the future is ancestral? Or will there be no future?
Munduruku: I like the idea of the future being ancestral. It would be proof that what’s about to happen has already happened, that time is circular, that history repeats itself, that it’s reproducing itself right now in a harsh, cruel way, not just for indigenous peoples.
Harsh and contradictory, right? Even as indigenous territories are targeted by gold miners, loggers, and the expansion of agricultural frontiers, while we witness humanitarian crises such as those affecting the Yanomami in the Amazon and the Guarani and Kaiowá in Mato Grosso do Sul, the indigenous population continues to grow, with more and more indigenous people occupying spaces inaccessible to them until recently.
Munduruku: That’s not our contradiction. It’s the system that sees indigenous peoples as a problem. It’s always been the case. For thousands of years, we indigenous people have been building answers to some of the serious problems that humanity is facing. There are 300 indigenous peoples in Brazil fighting bravely to stay alive. This also involves the fight for land demarcation. Of course, there are no easy solutions.
You have just returned from Italy, where you attended the Bologna Children’s and Youth Book Fair. Brazil’s Minister for Indigenous Peoples Sonia Guajajara has just returned from the US, where, among other things, she took part in an event at Harvard. Last week, Ailton Krenak became the first indigenous person to occupy a seat in the Brazilian Academy of Letters. For the first time, [national indigenous agency] FUNAI is headed by an indigenous woman, lawyer Joênia Wapichana. Indigenous writers are also growing in number, not without some commercial success. Do you believe that society is eager to get to know what you have just termed “indigenous responses to some of the serious problems facing humanity?”
Munduruku: I’d say they’re trying to impose on us the obligation to provide answers and solutions to the crisis the white man himself has created. Of course the indigenous people are trying to make themselves more and more present. There’s no other way. Either we present ourselves as part of this society on the brink of destruction and madness, or we’re swallowed up by it without as much as a chance to speak. The point is, sometimes what may seem like a great thing can be a trap. The fact that we’ve found ourselves a spot in literature, academia, politics, and a number of other places can mislead us into thinking we’re doing a great thing when in fact we’re only helping feed the economic system that we reject.
You didn’t finish your answer about the possibilities for the future of indigenous peoples. What do you think these may be?
Munduruku: As I said, the solutions to the problems are not easy. Is there a future for indigenous peoples in this system in which we live? Is there a future where we can keep part of our traditions, including the option of continuing to live in the forest if we want to? I don’t know. I’m afraid it will end soon, because the system, greedy as it is, will seek to devour it all, as it has done for centuries. For 524 years, the indigenous people have been fighting a war against this system, preserving their territories. I’m not a good prophet, but I think what’s in store for us is that we’ll move more and more to urban centers at the risk of dying in confrontations.
Does that mean you are pessimistic about the future of indigenous peoples?
Munduruku: I wouldn’t say pessimistic. It’s just that hope is a fiction. And a fiction is a way of embracing the concept of future that we’ve already talked about, a future where we look for answers to present problems, when reality is much more cruel and the enemy much stronger than we can imagine. Sometimes, the enemy turns our hope into a product and uses it to deceive us. If admitting this is being pessimistic, then fine.
On the other hand, a large portion of your literary work is aimed at children and teenagers, which brings with it a good dose of optimism.
Munduruku: Yes, there’s something utopian about it. I use my writing for children as a way of reaching adults. I imagine that an adult will read a book before giving it to their child and I try to reach the adult through universal topics. Sometimes we need to use children’s tears to sensitize adults, who are in fact the ones who need patching up. That’s what my writing is, a kind of weeping meant to sensitize adults.
ABr